Initially, the main purpose of Bitcoin was to become a new and totally decentralized payment method. However, BTC is currently used mostly as a long-term store of value and investment like gold, or traditional stocks and bonds.
What might be the reason for this? One of the main problems for BTC was its inability to compete with the giants like VISA or MasterCard in terms of its transaction speed, and the cost of processing the transaction.
The main problem has been the number of transactions that the BTC network is capable of processing. Bitcoin’s absolute maximum capacity is a mere seven transactions per second, while Visa easily handles an average of 150 million transactions every day.
As more and more people started using Bitcoin after the boom of 2017 the network became bloated and overloaded. Along with the total number of transactions, the waiting times, and (more importantly) transaction fees, have skyrocketed.
Now the situation has significantly improved. The transaction confirmation time now averages between ten and thirty seconds, and the fee is usually about one US dollar, though we know not what tomorrow will bring.
These facts made some huge companies stop accepting Bitcoin as a payment method. Among those who discontinued acceptance of BTC as an acceptable payment method are many retail and online giants such as Dell, Fiverr, and Steam. The main reason mentioned by these companies was the lack of interest by users.
There nevertheless remains some big players that have continued to accept BTC as an approved payment method. So if you have BTC that you want to spend, keep in mind that you can exchange it for goods or services at one of these companies, and many thousands more:
- Overstock
- Shopify
- Merchants
- Etsy
- PureVPN
- Namecheap
- Xbox
- PlayStation Network
- Expedia
- Air Baltic
- Subway
This is, of course, not a complete list of companies that accept Bitcoin. Further, through the use of gift certificate purchases using bitcoin (there are websites that sell gift certificates to thousands and thousands of retailers on which you can use your BTC to buy the gift certificates), the list of possible retailers that you can use your BTC to purchase products and services is nearly endless.
There are also some offline methods of using your Bitcoins. For example, there are some traditional brick and mortar stores in Japan that accept Bitcoin as a payment.
The acceptance of Bitcoin and alternative cryptocurrencies will certainly continue to rise, and in a few years will be widely accepted as payment methods worldwide.
For now, you can use a PointPay secure wallet to keep your BTC, or use our exchange to trade it.
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